Nicholas Boggs:
Well, I think love was politics for him. I mean, I think love is everywhere in his writing. It’s in his essays, right?
“The Fire Next Time,” he talks about how white and Black Americans must, like lovers, come to understand each other and confront the country’s past and present. All of his novels are love stories, from “Giovanni’s Room,” “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Another Country,” “If Beale Street Could Talk.”
So I really wanted to understand why it was that we sometimes think of him as a great essayist, but the novels aren’t as good, when, in fact, you have to read them together. You couldn’t understand “The Fire Next Time” without reading what he just did before that in another country, where he’s looking at these interracial relationships and complexities.
And then he called for those kinds of coalitions “In The Fire Next Time”. “Giovanni’s Room,” he wrote “Preservation of Innocence,” kind of about the perniciousness of homophobia. He couldn’t have written, “Giovanni’s Room” without having written those essays.
So you have to look at everything together for Baldwin.
